Overall RatingNo Ratings
Value for the $No Ratings
EffectivenessNo Ratings

Rate This!

NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links

As of yesterday, January 20th 2007, all outbound wiki links will contain the rel=”nofollow” tag.

The hope is that this will tremendously cut down on the amount of spam on Wikipedia. There will always be spam-link attempts over at Wikipedia. Some spammers are under the mistaken impression that Yahoo and MSN do not utilize the “nofollow” protocol. Some just don’t understand it, and some are looking for traffic instead of link popularity. But this should certainly help the situation.

It will be interesting to see which websites drop off the face of the earth because they relied so heavily on link popularity from Wiki pages.

This is yet another unfortunate side-effect of working in an industry where ethics gradually corrode into an unrecognizable, blurry, gradient between white and black. All of those wonderful, respected resources out there that were getting link popularity from Wikipedia are now being punished along with the many spam links to SEO contest phrase pages, overseas pharmacies, gambling sites, mortgage lead gen. pages, ring tones, snake oil diet pills, etcetera, etcetera…

And this all happened because of a new SEO contest. I have never and will never participate in one of these. If you have that much time on your hands, perhaps you should use it trying to get better results for your clients instead of spamming links to nonsense words for your own ego boost.

- Read more about it here -

Regarding Andy’s comment below, here is a link to a very good post without a nofollow tag. He has some great points, but the jury is still out on nofollow, as far as I’m concerned. I don’t like spending twenty minutes researching the backlinks and content on a link in someone’s name every time I get what looks like a valid comment. That’s enough for me. But he does have a very good point.

4 Customer Reviews of “NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links”

NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links Review by Andy Beard, January 21, 2007

  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated

Actually it has been proven time and time again that Yahoo follow links despite nofollow.

NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links Review by Everett, January 22, 2007

  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated

Not according to Yahoo:
http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/basics/basics-10.html

Perhaps people are assuming that because a link shows up using the linkdomain: command or Yahoo Site Explorer it is being counted towards their link popularity. I’m not sure and will not pretend to know at this point whether that is true or not.

Thanks for your input Andy. I would like to point out to my readers that you have a very good post on the subject:
http://andybeard.eu/2007/01/wikipedia-nofollow-plugin-wikidigg.html

Cheers,

Everett

NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links Review by Andy Beard, January 22, 2007

  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated

The post you point to is in the metatags in the header and all the search engines have always supported those.

As for Yahoo, you might find this post interesting

http://www.macalua.com/2006/11/03/nofollow-yahoo-still-doesnt-follow/

And just as an example of what “nofollow” does for the internet, you just pointed your readers in the direction of a “very good post”, but the link is nofollowed.

The same is true of the very valid link to Macalua

I could legitimately quote some of his post too, but that would be ethically wrong because Google would not be able to determine the original source of the words.

NOTICE: Wikipedia Now NoFollows All Outbound Links Review by Everett, January 22, 2007

  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated
  • Not Rated

The page talks about meta tags, but the last line mentions nofollow:

“To prevent the crawler from following links, use the NOFOLLOW tag.”

I know they are talking about nofollow in the meta, but they do mention that tag specifically.